The Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, named me as a 2009 recipient of the Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year Award, in April. From the press release:
Lansing, Mich. -The third annual Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year Award recipients have been selected and three professors from Michigan's 15 public universities have earned this honor.
"Higher education is one of the few good investments in these hard economic times," said Michael Boulus, Executive Director of the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, "We need to honor those who continue to contribute to its success and produce well prepared and intelligent graduates of Michigan's 15 public universities. These outstanding professors are actively involved in developing the minds of Michigan's future, and deserve recognition for their work."
The Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year recognition program recognizes the outstanding contributions made by the faculty from Michigan's public universities to the education of undergraduate students. Each of Michigan's 15 public universities were invited by the Presidents Council to nominate a faculty member who has had a significant impact on student learning through various mediums, including work in the classroom and student advising.
Since fall, 2002, I have been responsible for the Senior Capstone Design Course (ECE 480), a key component of our ABET-accredited programs in electrical engineering and in computer engineering. I have worked to make the course better preparation for the next stage of engineering that our students undertake. In 2003, I began introducing projects sponsored by industry so that teams of students would have a real customer to satisfy. By 2004, all teams had real sponsors, (about thirty different companies and government agencies have sponsored projects so far, with many returning for multiple semesters.) Once sponsored projects were firmly launched, I initiated ECE Design Day, in which all teams made oral presentations and poster displays of the prototypes they built, for their sponsors, fellow students and the public. ECE Design Day was held on the last day of classes each fall and spring semester, in MSU's International Center. The program garnered attention from local media, and some projects were even featured on global media (both CNN and BBC covered a project in which our students built a clothes dryer accessible to blind users). I introduced one or two "humanitarian projects" each semester, in which students work under sponsorship of grants obtained from donors to develop technology to assist persons with disabilities, in cooperation with MSU's Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities. In 2006, we merged ECE Design Day with the pre-existing Mechanical Engineering Design Day and held them jointly in the MSU Union, as the first College of Engineering Design Day. Other departments have joined or agreed to join the activity, and it has been expanded to two days. Thursday includes several hundred middle school students bused in to work on small construction projects and interact with our younger students, and Friday includes high school students brought in to do projects, attend presentations, interview our senior design students at their posters, and judge the winners of the poster competition for ECE students.
In order to assure that students are well prepared to contribute to their teams, the capstone course now includes four required "miniprojects" in its laboratory component. These miniprojects include work with a digital signal processor (DSP), designing and building a pulse synthesis circuit with a timer chip and learning to solder it on a prototype board, programming a microprocessor and doing analog-to-digital conversion to make a battery tester, and implementing serial communication between a computer and a microprocessor and building a graphical user interface (GUI) on the computer. Individual completion of these miniprojects assures that all students are familiar with the kinds of tools used in most design projects and can fully contribute to their project team.
Each student keeps an engineering notebook, recording all research and conceptual exploration, calculations, etc., done as part of their team's project. The notebook is kept just as an engineer working in industry would normally do. Each team makes three oral presentations: the project proposal (to class and sponsor), a 25-minute technical lecture on a topic selected by the instructor, and their final presentation at Design Days, which is also webcast live, assisting any sponsors, parents or potential employers to see the students in action, even if they cannot attend Design Days in person.
In response to feedback received from the employers of our graduating students, in 2006 I introduced a 5-lecture component on Design for Six Sigma, familiarizing our students with a design and quality methodology in widespread use in industry. Use of these methods has yielded a continuing improvement in the quality of the students' final reports, as judged by a panel from industry. I also introduced lectures on Product Lifecycle Management, another technique students frequently encounter in the workplace, and on intellectual property. Lectures on a variety of technical topics assist students with their design tasks early in the semester. Other lectures on effective teaming, project management, preparing an oral presentation, writing of technical reports, etc., prepare the students for their team projects.
The most exciting recent student project in the Capstone Design Course involves a series of teams designing inexpensive computer workstation configurations for deployment in Tanzanian schools. Characteristic of the environment is lack of grid power or unreliable service, so all systems must be either solar powered or run from a sizable Uninterruptible Power System. The student team we took over in December, 2008, had unforgettable experiences in the village of Losirwa, in the Monduli District of Tanzania. A brief VIDEO made by MSU for the Big Ten Network illustrates some of their work. A longer video is HERE. Teams have returned to the village in May, 2009, December, 2009, and May, 2010. Local support is being provided by student teammates from University of Dar es Salaam. Picture shows a training session we held for six teachers from Baraka Primary School, introducing them to their new computer system.
In response to student feedback, and in my role as chair of the department's Undergraduate Studies Committee, in 2006 we separated the ethics and professionalism component that had been in the senior capstone and made it a junior-level 1-credit required course. This new writing-intensive course helps to prepare our students for their technical writing tasks in the capstone design course, which are extensive. Each team in ECE 480 writes a preproposal, proposal, two Design for Six Sigma reports, two progress reports, a paper dealing with the aspects of the design beyond pure functional performance (environmental, safety, standards, product liability, intellectual property, lifecycle management, etc.), and a final report. Each individual writes four lab reports, keeps an engineering notebook, and writes an application note and a professional self-assessment. Each team also creates and maintains a web site on their project.
I also teach ECE 390, Professionalism and Ethics, a required 1-credit junior-level course that introduces contemporary issues in engineering practice and requires students to analyze these issues and write three individual papers about them. Students are given written feedback on content and form of each paper. A series of guest speakers augment the lectures by the instructor, describing real-world experiences in topics such as contracts, employment agreements, entrepreneurship, and business and engineering ethics.
Bill Punch (Computer Science and Engineering) and I co-teach a graduate course in evolutionary computation, CSE 848, in fall semester of even-numbered years. Lectures in the first half of the semester introduce students to the principles and practice of evolutionary methods like genetic algorithms and genetic programming, for search, optimization, and machine learning. These lectures interest many of the students in using evolutionary computation in their thesis research. The class also provides them practical experience presenting a paper from the literature to the class and carrying out a term project using evolutionary computation, including an oral presentation and written report.
I am now working with two faculty members in the Department of Telecommunications, Information Systems and Media to develop a new undergraduate specialization in Information and Communications Technology for Development. For students who choose this specialization, it will provide several courses to orient them to the economic and social conditions of some developing country/region, and a course dealing with the technological challenges faced by such an area. A practical field experience, normally in the summer, will give them experience implementing some technological change in a developing region. Pilot studies for this specialization were begun with a student design project in fall semester, 2008, followed by a trip to Mto wa Mbu, Tanzania, in December, 2008, to install a solar-powered, internetted computer laboratory they designed in the Baraka Primary School, in Losirwa Village, a Maasai community. Pictures and videos from this project are available HERE, logging in with username = lenovo and password len4MSU.
In 2000-2002, I taught the senior-level course "Operating Systems Principles," CSE 410, three times, for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Earlier in my career, I frequently taught Discrete-Time Systems, a required junior-level course, and the introductory course in microcomputers, using the venerable DEC LSI-11 hardware. I developed a series of laboratory design problems to accompany that course. In the 1970's, I developed a two-quarter sequence for engineers and biologists, which included a 1-quarter course introducing biologists to modeling and computer simulation, a 1-quarter course introducing electrical and systems engineers to biological modeling, and a 1-quarter course in which mixed teams produced a model and computer simulation of some biological/ecological system. This course sequence was attended by hundreds of biology students (undergraduate and graduate), about a dozen biology faculty members, and over 100 engineering undergraduates.
